


Eye of the Storm

by shakespearespaz



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Gen, One Shot, Post 1x10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-01
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-21 11:33:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1549064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shakespearespaz/pseuds/shakespearespaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Rachel is freed from her captivity, Bass visits her empty room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eye of the Storm

He’s furious.

He's bruised and bloody and sweaty, and the frustration has simmered too long. He wants to hurt something, himself even, squeeze someone until the light is almost gone and then let them return, choking and sputtering. But there’s no one. He’s lost them, let them flee from his grasp.

The loss of control nearly drowns him.

He kicks the door to her bedroom open violently, ignoring that he’s probably cracked the painted wood with his heavy boot. Bass realizes that he’s never been in her room without her before.

Even during random searches, which would inevitably turn up filched silverware, scissors, a razor blade once, pages of cramped handwriting in what he thought was Latin, and silly mementos like postcards and jewelry that she’d had with her since she’d arrived, she would be there. Her eyebrow would creep up in a challenge when he withdrew the ornate cosmetic bottle filled with pilfered hard liquor from her sock drawer, and he would wonder which distracted private had missed that.

He smirks and turns to the bed, but she’s not sitting there, shoulders pushed back and chin tilted defiantly towards him. It’s like something has been yanked out of his inner sanctum, the tiniest, most relevant detail of the room across the hall stripped away. It’s as simple as someone removing the curtains to drench the space in unfamiliar light. Jarring.

He lights a candle as dusk settles into the room, his pounding heart finally slowing. He should be getting the report in a few hours, on whether they were incinerated in restaurant or not. His guess is not, although he wonders what the slight difference between the two answers could make now. He’s already driven them away, and all he has to show for it is a purple face and a silent room.

He’d done nothing like this when Miles had left; Rachel still required attention, drugged and flung into a dark cell. He hadn’t asked anything about the Blackout for two years, as the Republic faced larger problems with Miles’ absence.

She’d lapsed into silence after a month or so in the cell, but Bass always assumed that she had quietly sorted the pieces out in her head. Once he had restored her to her old haunts, he would often lurk to her, when winter evenings needed more than candle to fill the darkness.

The first words she spoke to him and only words she said for a long time after were simple but unanswerable.

“Why?”

It continued to go unanswered.

Instead, they took up a pattern whenever he settled at her table to sort through paperwork. Lies in vicious form once she’d recovered her strength and found her voice. Truth in silences.

“Do you miss him?” he’d ask across the darkened room, as she lay along the couch reading.

She would pretend she didn’t hear him and struggle to stay focused and he would know. Or she would lay the book neatly down and find his eyes, and tell him plainly that she could not miss her captors and that he would do best to follow suit, with some choice words included in her empty threat.

Theirs worked because she was powerless with him, he had concluded. Miles had left himself vulnerable. Bass knew how to close himself off. He visited her less and less, only when he needed something, or finally to introduce her to a promising officer named Strausser.

Suddenly Bass can’t breathe. The room is almost dark except for the candle dripping expectantly onto the shiny table. This silence is unlike Rachel’s; it is impartial and inhuman. Rachel may have been able to survive there, but Bass can’t. Without her it is another battlefield after the killing is done, the cell after the prisoner has been executed.

He leaves. Jeremy could decide what to do with the room.

It only makes him feel emptier than Rachel’s coldest glares ever could.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this piece before 2x19 aired, but the way their relationship unfolded in that episode was how I had envisioned it in this piece, so that's why I'm posting this now even though it has been in my drafts for ages.


End file.
